F5 Networks recently announced the Super-NetOps initiative an Asia Pacific-first training program aimed at helping businesses and the wider IT industry more effectively embrace automation, unlock new levels of performance, address lingering skill gaps and help IT professionals deliver critical network operations functions through DevOps methodologies.

Evolving threat landscapes and multi-cloud environments have driven an increased demand for application services to be delivered in a more automated way. This demand for greater efficiencies within the IT infrastructure has created a gap in professionals skilled in both essential and emerging technologies—a key point that businesses have identified as an obstacle to success.

“When speaking with many of our customers, a common theme rings through—the gap when it comes to work practices and collaboration between the NetOps and DevOps teams,” said Adam Judd, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, China and Japan, F5 Networks. “As the need for IT services exceeds the capabilities of manual, task-based approaches, F5 is committed to meeting this challenge head-on, and helping the industry grow with the right tools and talent.”

F5’s global Super-NetOps program aims to provide participants with a combination of essential and emerging networking skills. Its aims to shake up the network operations (NetOps) community to facilitate stronger collaboration with developers (DevOps) and fuel a shift from manual task-based practices to achieve unprecedented levels of automation, continuous improvement and business return on investment. Already trialed with hundreds of F5 customers, the course has been specifically structured to break down operational silos and reduce time-to-service from days to minutes, all while ensuring applications meet necessary compliance, policy, and performance standards.

F5’s Super-NetOps program is delivered through a combination of video lessons and hands-on lab sessions and comes to the Asia Pacific with a localized approach that is tailored to the unique cultural nuances of the region. This initiative comes as governments across the region are implementing policies to plug the gaps in certain skillsets. In last year’s 31st ASEAN Summit hosted by the Philippines, investment in skills development was highlighted, leveraging on the economic integration among member countries.

In the coming months, F5 will roll out an expanded curriculum, including security-focused automated deployment methodologies for the burgeoning DevSecOps role. Other topics set to feature include application language frameworks and third-party automation toolchain enablement.

“As a majority of Asia Pacific businesses look to expand their offerings of digital products and services through to 2020, network operations expertise is more important than ever, especially as businesses look for faster, smarter and safer applications. The pressure is on traditional IT teams to enable the orchestration and agility needed to succeed in a digital economy by embracing programmability. The future is very much automated, and there’s no one better suited to automating the network than the engineers and architects that know how to keep the engine of the Internet economy running,” added Judd.

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